Far from the Tree(29)

She opened her eyes and rolled over so she could bury her face in Claire’s thigh instead.

“No, you didn’t say anything,” Claire agreed. “But you’re thinking.”

“I’m always thinking,” Maya told her. “I’m very smart that way. That’s why you love me.”

“Hmm, jury’s still out,” Claire said, but then she put her hand up the back of Maya’s shirt, pressing her palm against Maya’s skin, anchoring her down to earth. “Come back, come back, wherever you are,” she whispered.

Wherever Maya belonged, she was here now.

That was enough.

Maya found the wine bottle a few days later.

She had texted with Grace a few times, mostly responding to Grace’s somewhat awkward sentences. “Hi! How’s school?”

“Sucks donkey balls,” Maya had written back, then regretted it when Grace didn’t respond for a few days.

She didn’t text with Joaquin, but not because she didn’t want to. Maya just didn’t know what to say. It was hard to find words when you were adopted and your brother wasn’t, and it was pretty clear that you had been chosen because of things beyond your control. It was stupid to feel guilty, Maya told herself sometimes when the clock crept past three a.m. toward four a.m., and the lights from the cars hadn’t slowed down. But then she would picture Joaquin as a baby, waiting for someone, a family, a person, and that terrible feeling would push its way past her heart and into her throat, choking her.

In her worst place, in the darkest part of her brain, Maya didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, and just like Joaquin, she didn’t know how to keep it from happening.

Maya’s European History class was restaging the French Revolution (which Maya felt was extremely appropriate, given the number of people in that class who she would have gladly beheaded), and because she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, she had been assigned to costumes. Easy-peasy, she had thought, and then gone upstairs to rummage through her mom’s closet.

The wine bottle (or bottles, actually, but one of them hadn’t been opened yet, so Maya decided that it didn’t count) was wedged in the back of the closet, nestled into a pair of old boots that Maya thought would look spectacular on whoever played Marie Antoinette. They were heavy when she pulled them out, though, way heavier than any boots should have been, and by the time she’d wrestled them out of the closet and into the bedroom, the bottle of merlot had fallen out.

Maya looked at it for a long minute before reaching into the other boot and pulling out a half-full bottle of red zinfandel. It was cheap—Maya could tell by the label—which for some reason upset her even more. If her mom was going to hide wine in the closet, she could have had at least bought the good stuff, rather than this convenience-store shit.

“Hey,” someone said, and Maya whirled around so fast that she almost dropped the bottle. Lauren stood in the doorway, tugging on her lower lip. Maya hated when she did that. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Maya said, which was easily the dumbest thing she could have said, considering that she was standing in her parents’ bedroom, going through her mom’s closet without permission, and holding a bottle of half-drunk wine. “It’s nothing,” she amended. Somewhat better.

“Why are you holding wine?” Lauren asked. “Are you drinking?”

They were only thirteen months apart, but Lauren was younger. Maya knew that in her bones, the way she knew that Grace and Joaquin were older than she. It didn’t matter if they were related by blood or not: Maya was responsible for her little sister. She had to protect her.

“Get out,” she said to her. “Get out, Lauren, I’m serious.”

“But why are you—”

“Get out,” Maya said, gesturing with the wine bottle (bad idea) toward the door. “This isn’t about you, for once in your life.”

Maya would remember the look on Lauren’s face for a long, long time after that. Three a.m. would get a whole lot lonelier the next time she saw it against the backs of her eyelids.

“Is that . . . is that Mom’s?” Lauren asked.

Maya tightened her grip on the bottle and said nothing.

“Did you find it in her closet?” Lauren pressed on—and then dropped a bomb. “Because I found a bottle in the garage.”

Maya felt so stupid, standing there listening to her, holding the evidence while trying to hide it at the same time. Lauren finished, “It was in an old shopping bag. I think she drank most of it yesterday.”

The two sisters stood across from each other for a long few seconds before Lauren finally walked into the room. “There’s another bottle downstairs in that old Crock-Pot,” she said.

Maya sank down onto the bed because she wasn’t sure if her knees were going to support her. “How long have you known that she . . . ?”

“A month, I guess? Maybe longer? I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Lauren shrugged. “Because I knew you were meeting Grace and Joaquin, and—I don’t know—I didn’t want to burden you. You’ve got a lot going on.”

Lauren sat next to her, their shoulders slumped together. “You should have told me,” Maya said after a minute.

“Why?” Lauren asked, and Maya didn’t have an answer to that.